On Wednesday, January 23, 2013 08:07:19 PM Yinghai Lu wrote: > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Yinghai Lu <yinghai at kernel.org> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:32 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote: > >>> Again: Please explain what is bad with this solution. > >>> I cannot see a better and more robust way for kdump other than > >>> reserving the original reserved memory areas as declared by the BIOS. > >> > >> It is bad because it creates more complexity than is needed. > >> > >> The whole point is that what we want is simply to switch type 1 to type > >> X, with the sole exceptions being the areas explicitly reserved for the > >> kdump kernel. > > > > Do you prefer to "reserveram" way in attached patch? > > Hi, Thomas, > > Can you please check attached reserveram version on your setup? > > If it is ok, i will put it in for-x86-boot patchset and send it to > Peter for v3.9. But this (converting usable memory to reserved one before usable kdump memory is added) will let machines run into problems again for which the check: "mmconf area must be in reserved memory" got added? If, then memory which was usable before has to be converted to a special E820_KUMP (or whatever type) to make sure existing checks which look for "is reserved memory" still work the same way as in a productive kernel. Advantage of this would be that the info what originally was usable memory is preserved and can be used in future kdump related patches. So I guess the final patch should be: - Add a new e820 type: E820_KDUMP_RESERVED /* Originally usable memory where the crashed kernel kernel resided in */ - Use Yinghai's last posted patch, but instead of: + e820_update_range(0, ULLONG_MAX, E820_RAM, + E820_RESERVED); ... + e820_remove_range(start_at, mem_size, E820_RESERVED, 0); do: + e820_update_range(0, ULLONG_MAX, E820_RAM, + E820_KDUMP_RESERVED); ... + e820_remove_range(start_at, mem_size, E820_KDUMP_RESERVED, 0); - Come up with another memmap=kdump_reserve_ram memmap option name or however it should get named... If this proposal gets accepted, I can send a tested patch... Thomas